J. M. Coetzee Quotes

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

I'm only waiting for my wife to grow up.

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list.

Growing up is scary because it happens without you knowing it.

Looking back, I realize that this period of my life has irrevocably come to a close; my happy-go-lucky, carefree schooldays are gone forever. I don't even miss them. I've outgrown them. I can no longer just kid around, since my serious side is always there.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

I don't see what the point is in growing up.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

People grow up by living.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

For the past couple of years I was doing the party thing - going out a lot. But now I've turned 25, I feel I'm an adult.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

We live a protracted adolescence. At some point you must leave the party.

You know you're grown up when summer is just a season.

Midnight passes and I'm twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

In the career of a prodigy there invariably comes a time when it is compelled to relinquish being very clever for a child, and has to enter the business of life in competition with adults.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.